Quick question on the resume topic. What's your opinion on including a 'personal' section where you quickly list hobbies/interests? I see the positive side of giving schools insight into who you are and your activities, but also the negative of this not being very relevant to law school itself...

smoneill88 wrote:Quick question on the resume topic. What's your opinion on including a 'personal' section where you quickly list hobbies/interests? I see the positive side of giving schools insight into who you are and your activities, but also the negative of this not being very relevant to law school itself...

Thoughts?

There are positives to including hobbies, of course, but to a fault. Make sure to prune your hobbies to include your more intellectual/athletic/artistic ones over uninspiring/insipid/off-color ones. Like, lanyard-making, celeb-gossip-reading, and drinking shouldn't be there. However, chess club, marathon running, and web design definitely should.

smoneill88 wrote:Quick question on the resume topic. What's your opinion on including a 'personal' section where you quickly list hobbies/interests? I see the positive side of giving schools insight into who you are and your activities, but also the negative of this not being very relevant to law school itself...

Thoughts?

I used this section to put a few personal experiences that are revealing/unique but don't really fit well in the other categories or into my PS/app answers. I have three things and they are vastly different from one another, but all about me. One is about a famous foreign dissident and expert on a topic I wrote my UG thesis on who published it on his website (so not a publication per se, but pretty cool since he's been on house arrest for a decade, I was certainly honored), another is about an international sporting event I participated in with a foreign team where women are not typically allowed to participate publicly in sports and our participation was the result of heavy lobbying/activism, and the final one simply points out something personal about me that is easily missed in my PS (namely the fact that the things I talk about doing were done while having 2 small children).

So I guess I used it a little differently than the standard hobbies section, if that makes sense, more like a "fun facts" section. I don't know if that's common practice, but I like what it adds to the formality of the rest of the resume. I wouldn't put it on a job app of course.